Appeal to Return 4 to Death Row Is Heard

A North Carolina law used to overturn Marcus Robinson’s sentence has been repealed.CreditCreditShawn Rocco/The News & Observer, via Associated Press

The North Carolina Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments about whether it should reinstate death sentences for four inmates whose punishments were reduced under a law that allowed certain criminal defendants to challenge their sentences by raising claims of racial bias in their prosecutions.

The two arguments before the elected court were the latest chapter in a legal and political drama that has played out since 2009, when the state’s Racial Justice Act was signed into law, creating a path for new court challenges by scores of inmates awaiting execution. The law was repealed by the Republican-dominated legislature in June 2013, and the state is trying to reimpose death penalties that were overturned while it was in place.

The centerpiece of the session on Monday in Raleigh, the capital, was the case of Marcus Reymond Robinson, a black man who was the first person to have his punishment reduced under the Racial Justice Act. Mr. Robinson, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing a teenage boy, said racial biases had tainted jury selection during his trial. A judge in Cumberland County overturned his death sentence in 2012.

Mr. Robinson’s case was part of a study by researchers at Michigan State University, who found “powerful evidence that race was a substantial factor” in prosecutors’ decisions to strike potential jurors in 173 death-penalty cases in North Carolina, including 11 in Cumberland County.

On Monday, one of Mr. Robinson’s lawyers, Donald H. Beskind, told the justices that a county prosecutor had deliberately diluted the jury of blacks through his use of peremptory challenges, forming a pattern that he said “did not happen by chance.”

“No one should die at the hands of the state if racial discrimination played a significant role in that person being charged, convicted or receiving a sentence of death,” Mr. Beskind said. He noted that the prosecution had stricken half of the qualified black jurors for Mr. Robinson’s trial.

But Danielle M. Elder, a lawyer for the state, said that statistics alone did not amount to evidence of conscious racial bias that should void a death sentence.

“Statistical disparities do nothing to get this court any further in determining why a juror was struck,” Ms. Elder said. She argued that the black jurors who were eliminated from jury service had “completely obvious reasons for being stricken.”

Echoing other prosecutors who have criticized the Michigan State University report, which is central to Mr. Robinson’s case, Ms. Elder also contended that the study was defective because it could not account for every factor lawyers weigh when selecting jurors. “Jury strikes in capital cases are not by chance,” she said. “They’re decisions. They’re motivated.”

Mr. Beskind responded that the Racial Justice Act, which was heavily amended in 2012 and repealed last year, did not stipulate that discrimination had to be purposeful and overt to yield a modified sanction.

The three other cases, which were argued as a group before the Supreme Court on Monday, also originated in Cumberland County, which has a population of about 326,000 and includes Fayetteville, one of North Carolina’s largest cities.

The death sentences for those defendants, two black men and a Native American woman, were reduced in 2012 to life imprisonment without parole.

Ms. Elder accused the county judge in those appeals, Gregory A. Weeks, of making his decisions “before the first bit of evidence came in.” Judge Weeks also overturned the original death sentence given to Mr. Robinson.

But a lawyer for the three defendants, Jay H. Ferguson, cited problematic training programs for prosecutors regarding juror selection before the crimes took place and “the disparate treatment of jurors and strike decisions” as evidence of clear discrimination in Cumberland County.

The Supreme Court did not say when it would issue opinions in the cases. North Carolina has not executed an inmate since 2006.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Appeal to Return 4 to Death Row Is Heard. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe